Investigate the impacts of assimilating satellite rainfall estimates on rainstorm forecast over southwest United States

Using the MM5-4DVAR system, a monsoon rainstorm case over southern Arizona (5-6 August 2002) was investigated for the influence of assimilating satellite rainfall estimates on precipitation forecasts. A set of numerical experiments was conducted with multiple configurations including using 20-km or 30-km grid distances and none or 3-h or 6-h assimilation time windows. Results show that satellite rainfall assimilation can improve the rainstorm-forecasting pattern and amount to some extent. The minimization procedure of 4DVAR is sensitive to model spatial resolution and the assimilation time window. The 3-h assimilation window with hourly rainfall data works well for the 6-h forecast, and for 12-h or longer forecasts, a 6-h assimilation window will be requested. Copyright 2004 by the American Geophysical Union

Impact of assimilating rainfall derived from radar and satellites on rainstorm forecasts over the Southwestern United States

The impact of assimilating rainfall derived from radar and satellites on rainstorm forecasts over the Southwestern United States is discussed. The major advantage of 4DVAR is the use of full model dynamics and physics to assimilate multiple-time-level observation data. Rainfall assimilation via 4DVAR is used to improve the moisture distributions in model IC. It is found that by using 4DVAR to generate model IC, the precipitation intensity and patterns can be improved substantially over the mid-latitude plain regions

Influence of assimilating rainfall derived from WSR-88D radar on the rainstorm forecasts over the southwestern United States

In this study, the impact of rainfall assimilation on the forecasts of convective rainfall over the mountainous areas in the southwestern United States is investigated. The rainfall is derived from the U.S. Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) radar network, and the fifth-generation Mesoscale Model (MM5) Four-Dimensional Variational (4DVAR) system is employed in the study. We evaluate the rainfall assimilation skill through two rainstorm events (5-6 August and 11-12 September 2002) that occurred over the southwestern United States in 2002. A series of experiments for the two cases is conducted. The results show that the minimization process in the 4DVAR is sensitive to the length of assimilation window and error variance in the observation data. Assimilation of rainfall can produce a better short-range precipitation forecast. However, the time range of improved forecasts is limited to about 15 hours with the model resolution of 20 km. It is indicated that rainfall assimilation produces more realistic moisture divergence and temperature fields in the initial conditions for the two cases. Therefore the forecast of rainstorms is closer to observations in both quantity and pattern. Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union

From fire whirls to blue whirls and combustion with reduced pollution.

Fire whirls are powerful, spinning disasters for people and surroundings when they occur in large urban and wildland fires. Whereas fire whirls have been studied for fire-safety applications, previous research has yet to harness their potential burning efficiency for enhanced combustion. This article presents laboratory studies of fire whirls initiated as pool fires, but where the fuel sits on a water surface, suggesting the idea of exploiting the high efficiency of fire whirls for oil-spill remediation. We show the transition from a pool fire, to a fire whirl, and then to a previously unobserved state, a "blue whirl." A blue whirl is smaller, very stable, and burns completely blue as a hydrocarbon flame, indicating soot-free burning. The combination of fast mixing, intense swirl, and the water-surface boundary creates the conditions leading to nearly soot-free combustion. With the worldwide need to reduce emissions from both wanted and unwanted combustion, discovery of this state points to possible new pathways for reduced-emission combustion and fuel-spill cleanup. Because current methods to generate a stable vortex are difficult, we also propose that the blue whirl may serve as a research platform for fundamental studies of vortices and vortex breakdown in fluid mechanics

Decentralized Estimation over Orthogonal Multiple-access Fading Channels in Wireless Sensor Networks - Optimal and Suboptimal Estimators

Optimal and suboptimal decentralized estimators in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over orthogonal multiple-access fading channels are studied in this paper. Considering multiple-bit quantization before digital transmission, we develop maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) with both known and unknown channel state information (CSI). When training symbols are available, we derive a MLE that is a special case of the MLE with unknown CSI. It implicitly uses the training symbols to estimate the channel coefficients and exploits the estimated CSI in an optimal way. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose suboptimal estimators. These estimators exploit both signal and data level redundant information to improve the estimation performance. The proposed MLEs reduce to traditional fusion based or diversity based estimators when communications or observations are perfect. By introducing a general message function, the proposed estimators can be applied when various analog or digital transmission schemes are used. The simulations show that the estimators using digital communications with multiple-bit quantization outperform the estimator using analog-and-forwarding transmission in fading channels. When considering the total bandwidth and energy constraints, the MLE using multiple-bit quantization is superior to that using binary quantization at medium and high observation signal-to-noise ratio levels

Revisit of cosmic age problem

We investigate the cosmic age problem associated with 9 extremely old globular clusters in M31 galaxy and 1 very old high-$z$ quasar APM 08279 + 5255 at $z=3.91$. These 9 globular clusters have not been used to study the cosmic age problem in the previous literature. By evaluating the age of the universe in the $\Lambda$CDM model with the observational constraints from the SNIa, the BAO, the CMB, and the independent $H_0$ measurements, we find that the existence of 5 globular clusters and 1 high-$z$ quasar are in tension (over 2$\sigma$ confidence level) with the current cosmological observations. So if the age estimates of these objects are correct, the cosmic age puzzle still remains in the standard cosmology. Moreover, we extend our investigations to the cases of the interacting dark energy models. It is found that although the introduction of the interaction between dark sectors can give a larger cosmic age, the interacting dark energy models still have difficulty to pass the cosmic age test.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in PR